Tail Section of Crashed Plane Found in San Francisco Bay

U.S. investigators say they have found part of the tail section of the Asiana Airlines plane that crashed Saturday at San Francisco airport.

The chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, Deborah Hersman, told a news conference Monday that a "significant piece" of the plane's tail was found in San Francisco Bay. She said other parts of the aircraft also are visible at low tide.

Hersman said the plane's flight data recorder shows the aircraft was flying at a speed well below what it should have been traveling when it crashed.

Two Chinese schoolgirls were killed and about 180 of the more than 300 people on board were injured when the Asiana plane clipped a seawall short of the runway and went skidding out of control, shredding the tail end of the plane and starting a fire.

The airline says the pilot of the plane was still in training to fly a Boeing 777 and was trying to land that type of aircraft at the San Francisco Airport site for the first time.

The flight data recorder also shows that as the plane approached the runway, its pilots were warned the aircraft was likely to stall and were asked to abort the landing.

Hersman said Sunday the verbal "abort" request came just 1.5 seconds before impact, too late to avoid the crash. Seconds earlier, she said, "engine stall" warnings sounded in the cockpit.

The two passengers killed were among a group of 30 Chinese students and their teachers headed to a summer camp from east China's Zhejiang province.

The flight originated in Shanghai and stopped in South Korea before heading to San Francisco .

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